Singapore

While much research has recently focused on generating physics-based adversarial samples, a critical yet often overlooked category originates from physical failures within on-board cameras—components essential to the perception systems of autonomous vehicles. Camera failures, whether due to external stresses causing hardware breakdown or internal component faults, can directly jeopardize the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. Firstly, we motivate the study using two separate real-world experiments to showcase that indeed glass failures would cause the detection based neural network models to fail. Secondly, we develop a simulation-based study using the physical process of the glass breakage to create perturbed scenarios, representing a realistic class of physics-based adversarial samples. Using a finite element model (FEM)-based approach, we generate surface cracks on the camera image by applying a stress field defined by particles within a triangular mesh. Lastly, we use physically-based rendering (PBR) techniques to provide realistic visualizations of these physically plausible fractures. To assess the safety implications, we apply the simulated broken glass effects as image filters to two autonomous driving datasets- KITTI and BDD100K- as well as the large-scale image detection dataset MS-COCO. We then evaluate detection failure rates for critical object classes using CNN-based object detection models (YOLOv8 and Faster R-CNN) and a transformer-based architecture with Pyramid Vision Transformers. To further investigate the distributional impact of these visual distortions, we compute the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence between three distinct data distributions, applying various broken glass filters to a custom dataset (captured through a cracked windshield), as well as the KITTI and Kaggle cats and dogs datasets. The K-L divergence analysis suggests that these broken glass filters do not introduce significant distributional shifts. Our goal is to provide a robust, physics-based methodology for generating adversarial samples that reflect real-world camera failures, with the overarching aim of improving the resilience and safety of autonomous driving systems against such physical threats.

AAAI 2026

Fractured Glass, Failing Cameras: Simulating Physics-Based Adversarial Samples for Autonomous Driving Systems

adversarial machine learning

autonomous driving

computer vision

poster

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a crucial approach to enhance the generalization capabilities and improve the sample efficiency of RL algorithms. However, current MBRL methods focus primarily on building world models for single tasks and rarely address generalization across different scenarios. Building on the insight that dynamics within the same simulation engine share inherent properties, we attempt to construct a unified world model capable of generalizing across different scenarios, named Meta-Regularized Contextual World-Model (MrCoM). This method first decomposes the latent state space into various components based on the dynamic characteristics, thereby enhancing the accuracy of world-model prediction. Further, MrCoM adopts meta-state regularization to extract unified representation of scenario-relevant information, and meta-value regularization to align world-model optimization with policy learning across diverse scenario objectives. We theoretically analyze the generalization error upper bound of MrCoM in multi-scenario settings.
We systematically evaluate our algorithm's generalization ability across diverse scenarios, demonstrating significantly better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods.

MrCoM: A Meta-Regularized World-Model Generalizing Across Multi-Scenarios

With the rapid evolution of deepfake technologies and the wide dissemination of digital media, personal privacy is facing increasingly serious security threats. Deepfake proactive forensics, which involves embedding imperceptible watermarks to enable reliable source tracking, serves as a crucial defense against these threats. Although existing methods show strong forensic ability, they rely on an idealized assumption of single watermark embedding, which proves impractical in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formally define and demonstrate the existence of Multi-Embedding Attacks (MEA) for the first time. When a previously protected image undergoes additional rounds of watermark embedding, the original forensic watermark can be destroyed or removed, rendering the entire proactive forensic mechanism ineffective. To address this vulnerability, we propose a general training paradigm named Adversarial Interference Simulation (AIS). Rather than modifying the network architecture, AIS explicitly simulates MEA scenarios during fine-tuning and introduces a resilience-driven loss function to enforce the learning of sparse and stable watermark representations. Our method enables the model to maintain the ability to extract the original watermark correctly even after a second embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our plug-and-play AIS training paradigm significantly enhances the robustness of various existing methods against MEA. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

Uncovering and Mitigating Destructive Multi-Embedding Attacks in Deepfake Proactive Forensics

With recent advancements in next-generation data storage, especially in biological molecule-based storage, insertion, deletion, and substitution (IDS) error-correcting codes have garnered increased attention. However, a universal method for designing tailored IDS-correcting codes across varying channel settings remains underexplored. We present an autoencoder-based approach, THEA-code, aimed at efficiently generating IDS-correcting codes for complex IDS channels. In the work, a disturbance-based discretization is proposed to discretize the features of the autoencoder, and a simulated differentiable IDS channel is developed as a differentiable alternative for IDS operations. These innovations facilitate the successful convergence of the autoencoder, producing channel-customized IDS-correcting codes that demonstrate commendable performance across complex IDS channels, particularly in realistic DNA-based storage channels.

Disturbance-based Discretization, Differentiable IDS Channel, and an IDS-Correcting Code for DNA-based Storage

Domain generalization in semantic segmentation faces challenges from domain shifts, particularly under adverse conditions. While diffusion-based data generation methods show promise, they introduce inherent misalignment between generated images and semantic masks. This paper presents FLEX-Seg (FLexible Edge eXploitation for Segmentation), a framework that transforms this limitation into an opportunity for robust learning. FLEX-Seg comprises three key components: (1) Granular Adaptive Prototypes (GAP) that captures boundary characteristics across multiple scales, (2) Uncertainty Boundary Emphasis (UBE) that dynamically adjusts learning emphasis based on prediction entropy, and (3) Hardness-Aware Sampling (HAS) that progressively focuses on challenging examples. By leveraging inherent misalignment rather than enforcing strict alignment, FLEX-Seg learns robust representations while capturing rich stylistic variations. Experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 2.44% and 2.63% mIoU gains on ACDC and Dark Zurich. Our findings validate that adaptive strategies for handling imperfect synthetic data lead to superior domain generalization.

Do We Need Perfect Data? Leveraging Noise for Domain Generalized Segmentation

All-in-one image restoration (AIR) aims to address diverse degradations within a unified model by leveraging informative degradation conditions to guide the restoration process. However, existing methods often rely on implicitly learned priors, which may entangle feature representations and hinder performance in complex or unseen scenarios. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) as a classical gradient representation, we observe that it has strong discriminative capability across diverse degradations, making it a powerful and interpretable prior for AIR. Based on this insight, we propose HOGformer, a Transformer-based model that integrates learnable HOG features for degradation-aware restoration. The core of HOGformer is a Dynamic HOG-aware Self-Attention (DHOGSA) mechanism, which adaptively models long-range spatial dependencies conditioned on degradation-specific cues encoded by HOG descriptors. To further adapt the heterogeneity of degradations in AIR, we propose a Dynamic Interaction Feed-Forward (DIFF) module that facilitates channel–spatial interactions, enabling robust feature transformation under diverse degradations. Besides, we propose a HOG loss to explicitly enhance structural fidelity and edge sharpness. Extensive experiments on a variety of benchmarks, including adverse weather and natural degradations, demonstrate that HOGformer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes well to complex real-world scenarios.

Gradient as Conditions: Rethinking HOG for All-in-one Image Restoration

Interactive 3D segmentation embodies an advanced human-in-the-loop paradigm, where a model iteratively refines the segmentation of interested objects within a 3D point cloud through user feedback. Existing methods have achieved notable advancements at the expense of substantial resource consumption. To address this challenge, we introduce E$^2$I3D, an efficient and effective model for interactive 3D segmentation. Specifically, we propose a two-stage efficiency-to-effectiveness framework to decouple efficiency and effectiveness, avoiding the high training cost of joint optimization. For efficiency in the first stage, we present heterogeneous pruning, which reliably compresses the model by ranking and pruning the constructed heterogeneous groups separately based on gradient compensation. For effectiveness in the second stage, we design hierarchical click-aware attention that integrates geometric details from high-resolution features with global context from low-resolution features to enhance click-guided interaction. Extensive experiments across public datasets demonstrate that E$^2$I3D exceeds state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, on the KITTI-360 dataset, E$^2$I3D boosts the IoU for interactive single-object segmentation from 44.4% to 49.0% with 5 user clicks, while simultaneously reducing parameters from 39.3M to 5.7M.

Towards Efficient and Effective Interactive 3D Segmentation

To facilitate the large-scale deployment of autonomous driving in real-world scenarios, developing low-cost and highperformance 3D object detection systems has become a critical technical challenge. Although high-beam LiDARs provide denser point cloud data, their prohibitive hardware cost and high power consumption limit their practicality. In contrast, low-beam LiDARs offer advantages in terms of affordability and energy ef-ficiency, but often suffer from inadequate perception accuracy due to their sparser point cloud data. This pa-per focuses on the task of multimodal 3D object detec-tion with low-beam LiDARs, and proposes a novel ap-proach that integrates temporal and spatial representa-tion learning to enhance detection accuracy under sparser sensor conditions. Specifically, our approach comprises: (1) a Temporal Feature Prediction Learning (TFPL) module, which predicts the current BEV repre-sentation based on a sequence of historical BEV fea-tures; (2) a Spatial Feature Observation Learning (SFOL) module, which aligns BEV (Bird’s-EyeView) features from high-beam and low-beam LiDAR to enforce the low-beam features to approximate high-beam represen-tations; (3) an Uncertainty-Aware Fusion (UAF) strate-gy, which performs feature-wise weighting between the predicted and observed BEV features by leveraging channelwise variances, effectively mitigating perturba-tions in the learned BEV representations. Extensive ex-periments on the KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detec-tion datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves detection performance under low-beam LiDAR configurations.

Temporal and Spatial Representation Learning for Multimodal Low-Beam 3D Object Detection

Laboratory mice, particularly the C57BL/6 strain, are essential animal models in biomedical research. However, accurate 3D surface motion reconstruction of mice remains a significant challenge due to their complex non-rigid deformations, textureless fur-covered surfaces, and the lack of realistic 3D mesh models. Moreover, existing visual datasets for mice reconstruction only contain sparse viewpoints without 3D geometries. To fill the gap, we introduce MoReMouse, the first monocular dense 3D reconstruction network specifically designed for C57BL/6 mice. To achieve high-fidelity 3D reconstructions, we present three key innovations. First, we create the first high-fidelity, dense-view synthetic dataset for C57BL/6 mice by rendering a realistic, anatomically accurate Gaussian mouse avatar. Second, MoReMouse leverages a transformer-based feedforward architecture combined with triplane representation, enabling high-quality 3D surface generation from a single image, optimized for the intricacies of small animal morphology. Third, we propose geodesic-based continuous correspondence embeddings on the mouse surface, which serve as strong semantic priors, improving surface consistency and reconstruction stability, especially in highly dynamic regions like limbs and tail.
Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that MoReMouse significantly outperforms existing open-source methods in both accuracy and robustness.

MoReMouse: Monocular Reconstruction of Laboratory Mouse

One of the primary challenges in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection lies in the pervasive influence of coherent noise. As a common practice, most existing methods, whether handcrafted approaches or deep learning-based methods, employ the analysis or enhancement of object spatial-domain characteristics to achieve implicit denoising. In this paper, we propose DenoDet V2, which explores a completely novel and different perspective to deconstruct and modulate the features in the transform domain via a carefully designed attention architecture. Compared to DenoDet V1, DenoDet V2 is a major advancement that exploits the complementary nature of amplitude and phase information through a band-wise mutual modulation mechanism, which enables a reciprocal enhancement between phase and amplitude spectra. Extensive experiments on various SAR datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DenoDet V2. Notably, DenoDet V2 achieves a significant 0.8% improvement on SARDet-100K dataset compared to DenoDet V1, while reducing the model complexity by half. The code will be available soon.

DenoDet V2: Phase-Amplitude Cross Denoising for SAR Object Detection

Zero-shot video moment retrieval (ZVMR) is the task of localizing a temporal moment within an untrimmed video using a natural language query without relying on task-specific training data. The primary challenge in this setting lies in the mismatch in semantic granularity between textual queries and visual content. Previous studies in ZVMR have attempted to achieve alignment by leveraging high-quality pre-trained knowledge that represents video and language in a joint space. However, these approaches failed to balance the semantic granularity between the pre-trained knowledge provided by each modality for a given scene. As a result, despite the high quality of each modality’s representations, the mismatch in granularity led to inaccurate retrieval. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework, called $\textit{\textbf{Gran}ularity-\textbf{A}ware A\textbf{lign}ment (GranAlign)}$, that bridges this gap between coarse and fine semantic representations. Our approach introduces two complementary techniques: granularity-based query rewriting to generate varied semantic granularities, and query-aware caption generation to embed query intent into video content. By pairing multi-level queries with both query-agnostic and our generated query-aware captions, we effectively resolve semantic mismatches. As a result, our method sets a new state-of-the-art across all three major benchmarks (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions), with a notable 3.23\% mAP@avg improvement on the challenging QVHighlights dataset. The code will be made available.

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